


it calls me

by Kyoshu_Koi



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Light Angst, Minor Klance, Stargazing, like you have to look real hard for it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 15:18:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8672437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyoshu_Koi/pseuds/Kyoshu_Koi
Summary: Other children played with toys. Keith played with stars.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I saw Moana and this happened.

_And it seems like it's calling out to me, so come find me_

_And let me know, what's beyond that line, will I cross that line?_

When Keith was younger he’d climb to the top of the orphanage and stare out at the stars. A grubby little seven-year-old, barely any meat to him, with tattered clothes and a rat’s nest of hair climbing pipes and scaling walls like it was nothing.

It sure was a sight.

He’d have blisters galore come morning, alongside a beating from the adults, but Keith didn’t care. He’d go anyways, because the dots along the horizon glowed brighter than anything he’d ever seen. Big and small, clustered or not, they varied every way possible, sparkling like raindrops in the sun.

They mesmerized him, left him awestruck, sucked his soul closer and closer until he was standing tip toes on the edge of the roof, leaning out as far as possible just to catch another glimpse, another light, another shimmering dot he could add to the store of his memories.

He mapped them, memorized them, drew them in them in the dirt when the sun lay at its peak. He tried to project them in his dreams, creating stories of warriors who cast them into the sky, fabricating tales of their names and what they represented.

Other children played with toys.

Keith played with stars.

* * *

 

Katie didn’t play with stars. She counted them, watched them, researched them.

She’d seek Orion, count Betelgeuse, Meissa, Bellatrix, Mintaka, Rigel, Saiph, and Alnilam, measure them with her fingers, compare them to her map, wonder aloud how something so magnificent, so beautiful, was scientifically possible.

She’d sit on her brother’s lap, listen to him as he rattled of numbers and equations and gave explanations of gas and heat and cycles of life. He would lecture about supernova’s and dwarfs, red and blue and black and white. He enlightened her on suns much like Earth’s own.

She would stand by her father and listen to him speak of the changes in science, of how far technology had come, of moon landings and mars rovers and soon to come missions she should have paid greater heed to.

She found her interests, creating signals to read spaces and forge maps from satellites and rovers she’d long since hacked.

Katie didn’t simply stare at stars, no matter what other kids said, no matter the teasing and taunting. She was better than that. The he stars were better than that.

And so, she studied them.

* * *

 

Lance didn’t study the stars.

He tried once, attempted to check out a book and understand what was going on, but he just simply couldn’t comprehend the complexity within its pages. He paid the failure no mind, returned his tome, swam out on his board once his clock struck twelve.

His sister advised him not to, but he did anyways. Because the world was a beautiful place, the ocean at night was mystical, magical, anything and everything a child could dream of.

The beach soft and warm under his feet, and the water was inky, black and bottomless, terrifying, but the swim was worth it, everything was worth it once Lance watched spec after spec light up the water, twinkling like the ring on Mama’s finger. He’d stare and stare until he couldn’t tell sky from sea or sea from sky, until he only had the moon to light his way back home.

He’d gasp as he connected constellations, drew his own, found Orion and the Dippers and searched for Cassiopeia, the one Abuelita talked about. The selfish queen who knew nothing of humility, who was ousted to the sky.

But he couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than what he was seeing, stars shining to bright their rings connected into lines, shaping silhouettes and figures to be stared at for centuries upon centuries.

The stars were astounding.

And Lance loved them.

* * *

 

Hunk didn’t love the stars.

He found no appeal other than their beauty. They were lights in the sky, no different than lanterns or a city at night or a simple wave of glow sticks and flashlights at a concert. They had no meaning other than to simply be looked at, and, more importantly, they held no importance to him.

But the stories they left in their wake did.

And he told them to his siblings, to his cousins, to other kids on the island that were simply just curious. He told them of deities that swung them into the sky, of gods that lit them from the inside with magic and fire and mystical powers that the children would dare to replicate upon the sun’s rising.

He told of adventures and epics, and when he had no more stories to tell, he made up his own. He spoke of people that named the stars, of moons forged by gems, of burning spheres of rock shot down by enraged divinities.

Hunk didn’t watch the stars, but he spoke of them.

* * *

 

Shiro didn’t speak of the stars, he simply listened to them.

Listened to the wind as it blew through the trees, listened to the waves of Obaa-san’s koi pond, listened to the silence of the night. He listened for the things the stars granted him, for the things that would be gone if they weren’t there.

He was no idiot. He knew the science behind the magic, he knew the facts behind the mystic, but he chose to believe in their balance. He chose to believe that the stars had granted this Earth life, for the sun was a star.

He chose to respect them and their power, their strength, their light and their heat and their mass. His mother feared them, as did his father, for the stars were what was taking their son away. But Obaa-san loved them, she bowed to them as a child, and she still did now.

She taught Shiro of their power long before the Garrison did, long before he first met the Holts and all their brilliance.

And, long, long before Shiro ventured into the depths of space, he knew something, somewhere in that endless sky, was waiting for him.

* * *

 

Life before Voltron was a blur.

Faces turned to blobs, voices changed to sound waves, names became foreign upon one’s tongue, for the simple repetition needed to remember them created an alien sense around the noun. The only thing any of them had to hold onto was simple word of mouth stories and their clothes, both of which had been long since worn down.

The change had been hard on all of them.

It came to some, like Lance, early on.

The upgrade from crammed, two-story, one bathroom house to a royal castle in space wasn’t exactly welcomed. The sudden lack of people and laughter and crowdedness he’d grown to was gone in a flash, there was always quiet, never enough noise, never enough people in the castle.

It hit Hunk later, when he rambled out his mother, his aunts, his grandmother and sisters and brothers and cousins and everyone else back on the island, only to stop mid-sentence when he realized that using perfect tense was no longer the politically correct thing to do.

For Shiro, the longing for home had long since passed. Months spent in a ship, then in Galra captivity, then finally a giant spaceship with walls that echoed and floors that self-cleaned kind of did that to someone.

Keith, on the other hand, didn’t have much to miss – no family, no friends, just far off memories of kids that he’d occasionally play with before the orphanage enlisted him. But he still felt the emptiness al the others did. There weren’t any screaming children or nagging nanny’s or guards walking every corner, ready to catch one of the thousand kids in their programs.

And that hit him hard, even if he couldn’t recall most of it.

Pidge had pictures to look at, people to talk with to help recall memories. They could sit and talk with Shiro about Matt and their dad and all the goody things they would do, like pouring milk before cereal or sliding around in fuzzy, Halloween themed socks.

Shiro could reminisce with them and they could reminisce with Shiro.

But not everyone had that luxury.

Lance would wake every morning repeating names over and over like a mantra so he wouldn’t forget. It was routine, more so than his skin care, more so than Allura’s military drills and Hunk’s instance on shooting practice and Keith’s mandatory hand-to-hand lessons. Forcing himself to remember simple faces he’d known his entire life had become just as much of a daily action as did taking steps in a giant formed by mechanical cats.

Hunk would spend his nights writing of tales from his childhood, with poor style and misspelled words, but they were something to remember. He had books upon books laid around his room now, sheets of lyrics only half remembered, papers with bullet pointed plot lines and characters from his favorite novels.

They’d be passed around, added onto by anyone willing, though it mostly just caused fights about Fall Out Boy lyrics and Pokémon teams.

Keith, on the other hand, would just sit in the observatory and stare and stare and stare, trying to figure out how he’d come so far, how he’d survived so long. Hours would pass in a haze as he stayed there, huddled in a ball whilst familiarity tried to worm its way back in. Stars had always calmed him, he’d memorized them, even if they rotated and changed and migrated he could still know what to expect

Lance would always find him, sit with him, hold hands as they traded stories. Keith would listen as Lance cried, filling in the silence with his voice until the others found them and they formed a pile of human bodies mourning the absence of Earth. They’d stay there for a bit, huddled together like a team before the playoffs, until Allura or Coran came for them.

Then out into the battlefield they went.

* * *

 

“Did everyone get what they need?” Allura called.

A chorus of yeahs and nods followed close behind her words, having already formed on the Paladin’s tongues once she’d opened her mouth. Recon trip after recon trip had brought a sense of routine to these kinds of things.

In fact, everything, from the Galra to simple rescue missions, was starting to become predictable. It was supposedly a good thing.

“Alright then,” Allura announced, “Let us go then, we’ll be leaving for the next system soon. Coran has already programed our coordinates and is waiting for us inside.” Someone yawned. Someone nodded. Someone muttered something about space bacon. Allura looked like she wanted to smack them all.

With a few more yawns, they all headed for the castle, feet dragging across the electric blue rocks as they prepared to board.

Then Lance screeched to a halt, eyes blown wide as Pidge ran into his head first, head smacking against his spine.

“Hey!” they snapped, but he ignored them.

“Orion,” he whispered. Keith froze dead in his tracks. Shiro frowned in concern, turning to face Lance as he spoke again, his voice cracking halfway through as he pointed to distance. “It’s Orion! Orion, the Hunter!!”

Allura was up in a second. “A hunter?” the asked, whipping her head around to look for any Earthen enemies she’d not yet been aware of. “Are we in danger?”

“No, Princess,” Shiro muttered, eyes wide in realization, “There’s just …” he choked on his words.

Pidge had gotten up at this point, following Lance’s finger to the corner of the sky. “He’s right,” they whispered, “Lance is right. I can see Betelgeuse!”

Lance squealed, jumping up and down like a child on Christmas. “It’s here!” he screamed, latching onto Keith and shaking him like a ragdoll, “It’s here! I can see it!”

He pointed again and Keith searched desperately, mind flooding back to those nights on the roof, memorizing locations and proximities, shapes and forms and outlines that gave him hope for the next day. Keith gasped.

“I see it,” he proclaimed, laughing, “I see it! I see it!”

Hunk followed quick in suit, pointing to the tiny constellation to their right. Is was small compared to what they were used to, but it was there and it was noticeable once he looked for it.

He smiled. It wasn’t his first pick, he had no connections to it, but …

“I never thought I’d ever see it again,” he muttered.

Coran looked around, drinking in the nostalgia, the longing, the sorrow and happiness and overwhelming joy. “Where is it?” he asked.

Shiro pointed, “The one in the far corner, it looks like a kite and a triangle connected.”

He nodded, eyes scanning the area in hopes of comprehending the constellation they were all staring at. Allura mimicked his actions, following their fingers as they pointed to a constellation she’d never seen before.

“It’s named after a myth,” Pidge explained, voice thick, “Orion, the hero from one of Earth’s many countries. He’s long dead, we don’t even know if he was ever alive, but …” they trailed off.

“He must’ve been a great soldier,” Allura said.

“Nah,” Hunk laughed, “I’m, like, eighty percent sure he as a prick.”

Keith snorted, but nodded in agreement. Shiro opened his mouth to protest, however he quickly shutting it once he realized Hunk was probably right. Pidge just rolled their eyes. They only knew of the story, it wasn’t like they worshipped it.

“I don’t care if he was a prick,” Lance giggled out, dropping his arm and simply staring up at the glowing lights, each one bringing back wave after wave of feelings and memories he just couldn’t place, each leaving just as it appears.

“He’s beautiful.”

_See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me_


End file.
